Google Apps adds work group features for businesses

By Eric Auchard

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Network administrators, the custodians of an organization's passwords and privileges, may want to find another job as Google Inc helps business users set up and manage their own work groups.

On Thursday, Google expanded its free software suite, called Google Apps, to the so-called enterprise market to allow co-workers or students to collaborate on documents, calendars or presentations and to chat via instant messaging.

Google Apps Team Edition, as the Web service is known, adds teamwork features to the 18-month-old software, which initially allowed users to share documents only with other individual users, but lacked some group management features required by businesses.

"We basically removed the notion of an administrator," said Matthew Glotzbach, product management director for Google Enterprise, the company's business software unit.

"Everybody is on an equal footing. Any user can share a document with all the users," Glotzbach said.

Information technology (IT) managers have emerged as the disciplinarians of corporate life, enforcing policies needed to manage increasingly complicated systems as efficiently as possible in budget-constrained organizations.

In response, IT administrators often bear the brunt of frustrations many office workers have with technology.

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